Framework library · Leadership, teams and culture

Competing values framework

The competing values framework places organisational culture on two tensions: flexibility against control, and an internal focus against an external one. That gives four types (clan, adhocracy, market and hierarchy), and every organisation is a mix of them. Describing the mix now and the mix needed turns a vague wish to change the culture into specific shifts.

LevelIntermediate
TimeThirty minutes each for a group of people to allocate, then an hour to discuss
Who to involveA cross-section of the organisation, not only the leadership team, whose view of the culture usually differs most from everyone else's.
Also calledCVF, culture types, clan adhocracy market hierarchy

Use it when

  • A merger, a new strategy or a transformation needs the culture to shift, and "change the culture" needs to become specific.
  • Two parts of the business work in very different ways and keep colliding.
  • You want a shared language for what to keep and what to change.

Avoid it when

  • You need a validated diagnostic for research or benchmarking. Use the published OCAI instrument.
  • The real problem is a specific behaviour or process. Fix that directly.
  • Only the leadership team would take part. Their view of the culture is rarely the one the organisation lives.

How to run it

  1. Explain the four types

    Clan: collaborative, people-focused, loyal. Adhocracy: creative, entrepreneurial, risk-taking. Market: competitive, results-driven, customer-focused. Hierarchy: controlled, efficient, rule-based.

  2. Allocate 100 points for now

    Each person decides, separately and before any discussion, how much of today's culture each type accounts for.

  3. Allocate 100 points for what the strategy needs

    Not what people would like, but what the next three years require.

  4. Compare and discuss the gaps

    Shifts of 10 points or more are significant. For each, agree what people would start doing, stop doing and keep doing.

  5. Turn shifts into actions

    Leadership behaviour, measures, rituals and hiring are the levers. Write them in the so-what section.

Work through it

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Mistakes to avoid

  • Treating one type as good. Each has strengths and each fails in its own way when overdone.
  • Averaging everyone's scores and losing the disagreement, which is often the finding.
  • Planning a 40-point shift in a year. Cultures move slowly.

Where it comes from

Robert E. Quinn and John Rohrbaugh set out the framework in "A spatial model of effectiveness criteria: towards a competing values approach to organizational analysis", Management Science 29(3), 1983. Kim S. Cameron and Robert E. Quinn applied it to culture in Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture (1999), which introduced the OCAI instrument. The allocation below is a simplified version, not the OCAI. Source.

The allocation here follows the competing values framework as published by Cameron and Quinn. It is not the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), which is theirs and is not reproduced.

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